John Newton's thoughts, ideas and opinions on content management, enterprise software and open source.

5 posts categorized "Web/Tech"

2008.08.02

Groucho Marx once said, "I would not join any club that would have someone like me for a member." That was my original concern about attending the Fortune Brainstorm, a three day technology conference in Half Moon Bay California. I met one of the conference organizers, David Kirkpatrick at a couple of the World Economic Forum events and he is a very bright and insightful guy. But I thought it might be another one of these conferences where you spend a lot of money just to attend. Our marketing team convinced me otherwise.

Brainstorm last week was a very connected event with some very influential people. I recognized at least a quarter of them from Davos. The bloggers were also there in force with Robert Scoble, Om Malik and Kara Swisher participating as the first evenings entertainment. The subject matter was also generally more relevant that Davos as well given its proximity to Silicon Valley. Given how far I came, I used part of the time on Monday to do some interviews in San Francisco on our Alfresco Labs 3 launch, so I missed the opening sessions with Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Michael Dell, Mark Benioff from Salesforce and Brad Smith from Intuit. The setting for most of this was somewhat intimate with main room laid out like a giant conference room with lots of Herman Miller executive chairs. (Herman Miller was a sponsor.)

The environment was set up like an office. So everyone ends up doing work.

Although this was a tech conference, some of the focus was on how relevant tech is. The level of discussion was what you would expect in an article in Fortune magazine. That level of discussion is good to understand how the big trends are moving to affect everyone's lives, not just those in tech. The first breakfast session that I attended was on Cloud Computing with Marissa Mayer from Google, Adam Selipsky from Amazon, Kevin Lynch from Adobe, and Zach Nelson from NetSuite. Cloud Computing is increasingly attractive from a cost perspective, but enterprise customers are still worried about security and reliability. Google does not allow encryption and Amazon does not guarantee recovery and recommends that you back up your data on S3. So I asked the panel when we can expect security AND reliability. Marissa didn't answer and the other panelists answered the part of the question that they wanted to.

Mark Anderson hosted a session on the direction of technology with several CTO and technology leaders including Sophie Vanderbroek from Xerox, Padma Warrior of Cisco, and Bob Iannucci of Nokia. The discussion range as far as their technologies. Xerox is looking at collaboration and sees the future in intelligently understanding the content being handled in that collaboration in something called content-centric networking. This is something that Alfresco can get its head around. Cisco sees the internet morphing from a primarily messaging based platform to more of an entertainment platform. Video being a more natural form of communication will become more pervasive and that the real requirement will be more filtering rather than generating. Nokia took us on a cosmological tour of technology trying to show us that the bigger issues are around mobility and the data that affects our lives. In addition, data privacy will become one of the biggest issues to tackle.

Vinton Cerf, inventor of the Internet and now at Google, kept sitting in front of me and always asking questions. It made it difficult to get a question in myself since the moderators would always move to another part of the audience. Get your own seat Vint!

Nicholas Negroponte showed off for the very first time a dual-boot One Laptop Per Child XO machine (the famous $100 laptop) that is now configured to run both the OLPC operating system and Microsoft Windows.

David Kirkpatrick and Nicholas Negroponte showing of the latest dual boot OLPC XO

In "How Green is Your (Silicon) Valley?", VJ Joshi from HP, Rob Lloyd from Cisco, Jonathan Schwartz from Sun, and Michael Spliter from Applied Materials discussed the role that Silicon Valley can play in creating green solutions. By and large, as you would expect, IT makes things more efficient and eliminates the need for travel and face to face meetings. VJ kept it relatively small with the practical steps that HP is taking like making two-sided printing the default. Jonathan kept it big getting us to think about what will happen when IT services as a utility will be 10 times bigger. Jonathan Schwartz talked about MySQL's approach of no office buildings at all. But, I found Rob's and Cisco's point more insightful. When we start architecting our buildings (and homes) with information systems and controls in place, that is when we will really start to reduce our greenhouse footprint. Meeting rooms, transportation and environmental control facilitated by IT (and of course internet routers) will allow us to reduce transportation of ourselves and our resources.

David Kirkpatrick is writing a book on Facebook called The Facebook Effect and used this position to interview new COO Sheryl Sandberg. She puts on a much more media savvy front than Mark Zuckerberg, but not quite as much out-of-the-garage appeal. It all sounded a little too glib. Apparently she used to work in the White House at some point and Google. I was surprised to learn that co-founder Matt Cohler had left Facebook, although he was attending the conference. She announced that he was becoming a partner at Benchmark Capital. I bet Peter Fenton had something to do with that. I had interacted with Matt in relation to some work that we were doing with the World Economic Forum and it seemed that at least part of his role at Facebook was now taken up by Sheryl.

David Kirkpatrick and new Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg

At this point, my camera ran out of battery :-( I participated in a Lunch Lab on Healthcare facilitated by Marissa Mayer of Google and Zoe Baird of the Markle Foundation, but they did most of the talking. There were a few experts who got a word in edgewise, but I didn't really feel that I could participate despite having working with pharmaceutical companies on information management and classification for the last 15 years.

In World without Exits, Andrew Braccia (Accel), Danny Rimer (Index), Dana Settle (Greylock), David Siminoff (Venrock) and Quincy Smith (CBS Interactive) all talked about how there are no exits aside from acquisitions. Danny, one of the best investors in Europe and backer of MySQL and Skype, said that there are still acquirers for good companies. He said all of his portfolio that had been acquired since the beginning of the year had been enterprise software companies. Andrew said that he is telling his portfolio companies to hunker down for the next couple of years. I have heard such talk since 1994 before the big launch of Netscapes IPO.

Life on the Net 2018 was pretty interesting, although probably a little too diverse like several of the sessions at the conference. We had Larry Lessig - open source intellectual property specialist, Phil Rosedale - founder of Second Life and Half Moon Bay resident, Joichi Ito - chairman of SixApart. Larry's "the sky's falling and your privacy is gone" position was pretty scary. He said that the Patriot Act came in so fast that it must have been pre-written before 9/11. He said that he had sources that have told him that is exactly what happened and that there is an internet-based Patriot Act waiting to be put in place as a result of any sort of catastrophic disaster on the Net. Phil believes that virtual worlds of some sort will be the future of user interfaces to the internet because they are easier for older and non-experienced users to use. Obviously, we need more technology improvements for this to happen. Perhaps the biggest technical obstacle to be overcome is the notion of a single identity that is secure and non-repudiable.

The evening event started with a Tweet Out in the platform overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I now have more respect and interest in Twitter as a result of meeting so many Tweeters. Dinner was hosted by the government of Singapore and I met so many people that evening I can't recount it all. However, I didn't stay up so late that I didn't get a chance to get up early and take some pictures of the harbor I was staying next to. I waited too late to stay at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, but sometimes that can be an advantage, especially cost wise.

An early morning stroll around the harbor at Half Moon Bay.

I was up early enough to sit in on a breakfast roundtable on Programming for the Web and Social Networking. Now I thought this meant programming like programming a computer. They meant programming like NBC is setting up it's Fall line-up. Still interesting. I am getting a sense that there is still a new big wave of video and much richer content coming than just YouTube. And the opportunity to manage it, organize it, categorize it and monetize it will be huge.

Finally, I sat in on a real programming session with the Future of Code, featuring David Hansson of BaseCamp and Ruby on Rails fame, Grady Booch - early pioneer of Object Oriented Programming and at IBM, and Charles Simonyi of Intentional Software, creator of Microsoft Office and Space Tourist. They all take very different approaches to architecture and they spent a lot of the time telling each other that the others were wrong. They all have points and my biggest insight from this is what prejudiced guys they all are.

Grady Booch: "There are systems built upon systems and then you have a lot of crap. But that's enough about the Bush Administration."

I missed the rest because I had to head off to Sun Computers, but you can read more below about Eric Schmidt and Neil Young. We had gone to meet with Jonathan Schwartz who had left the conference the day before. He said that although there were interesting things there, he does go to a lot of those things. I asked him if they were all the same. He nodded. Lucky guy. Living 5000 miles away from the valley, I don't get to go to that many events of this quality.

2007.03.23

Yesterday, I was on a panel at The Server Side Java Symposium at the Venetian in Las Vegas. It’s been 7 years since I have been to the Venetian when we had the Documentum user group meeting, Momentum, at the Venetian. Having since been to the real Venice and been in a real gondola, the effect of seeing indoor canals and tromp l’oeil ceilings is even more surreal. (BTW - Don’t pay 80 euros to ride in a gondola in Venice. Spend one euro to take the Targetto. Don’t spend any money to ride a gondola in Las Vegas.)

This is the first time that I had met Joe Ottinger, the editor of The Server Side, in person. We have spoken on the phone before and he is a nice, funny, unassuming guy. Joe was the moderator of the panel that included Joaquin Ruiz from Spike Source, Brian Kim from Liferay, Bob McWhirter from JBoss.org, and Neelam Choksi from Interface 21 (Spring Framework). Geir Magnusson of Apache was also planned to be on there, but had other commitments. I know Joaquin and I were a bit surprised when we found out that the panel was only supposed to last 35 mins. (I got up at 5am and flown all the way to share 35 mins with 5 other people?!) Fortunately, Joe was able to start the session earlier and let the panel run on a bit longer. Most people stayed as well for the post-lunch session.

Most of the questions were about why open source and what license people should use. The reasons were consistent among us around the power of the model, the cost effectiveness of open source and the draw of the community. Joe had a question on how the community is managed and I think it was Dave who answered that it requires a certain level of control and discipline to ensure the quality of the code that is contributed. There were lots of questions around GPL, of which Joe is not a fan nor is he a fan of Richard Stallman. However, I think how people perceive GPL has changed in that you can combine non-GPL components with GPL and the FLOSS exception allows you to embed GPL in non-GPL systems. Everyone wants to know what will happen with GPLv3 and although we are tracking it, I can’t really say what will happen with the restrictions. (See Matt Asay's comments on GPLv3. Matt is our VP, Bus Dev and he knows a lot more about this than I do.) I commented on the concern that some OEMs have with LGPL in that it has not been tested in court. JBoss and RedHat have a very liberal and ISV friendly interpretation of it, but we need to have a court test to prove that it is okay to use in commercial software.

Richard Stallman

I appreciate the time that Joe gave us and the opportunity to speak about Alfresco. The Server Side has been a good source of the downloads that we have had so far. However, the whole area of Open Source Business Models is so much more than licenses. It really is a disruptive model not just for software, but for many other industry sectors. I organized a few thoughts on the flight over to Las Vegas.

Peter Fenton

When we first started to look at starting Alfresco, we interviewed and discussed the concept with some of the best thinkers in open source. One person in particular was very helpful due not just to his exposure to open source, but due to the thinking he had applied to looking at open source in the abstract as an investment thesis. Peter Fenton was an associate at Accel Partners and now a General Partner at Benchmark Capital. Peter had come up with a set of criteria of what worked and what did not work in open source. At the time we started, there had been 10 years of experimentation in investing in open source, although I think the last couple of years have been particularly instructional. Here are Peter’s criteria:

There must be a large market with millions of users. I would characterize this as having a critical mass. If you are going to try and spread this as far and wide as possible and you are only going to get a couple of percent actually converting to paying customers, then that number must be very large. In this case, horizontal markets are good and vertical markets can be very limiting.

There should be organic adoption of the project. As Peter points out most projects flame out in the first 2 years. The long, slow adoption of the organic community is a good thing. However, there are other ways to get a community. We have found a natural community in Enterprise Content Management practitioners who find Alfresco familiar and with which they are able to deploy much more cost-effectively than closed source options. Likewise, companies like IBM and Adobe have ready made communities as they exploit the open source model. Perhaps Microsoft will one day realize the potentially powerful open source community that they will be able to create with a quick email from Bill.

There should be demand-side economies. It’s hard to know exactly what Peter means here and it might be Stanford MBA speak for scarcity of open source alternatives. He states that there should be a natural monopoly or duopoly. As an investment, you are looking for a company to be big and therefore it needs to be not just a leader in the segment, but dominant. Open source web content management on its own is an example of a market that is too diffuse. Open Source Enterprise Content Management is not.

There needs to be sufficient product complexity or drift. This complexity provides a means to add value-added service over a product that is free. Products like application servers and database management systems are inherently complex. Many of the Apache projects, such as Tomcat, are too simple for someone to make money on them. It is possible that a product can work too well.

The project should address a new frontier of adoption. Innovation happens at the edge. This should not just be old stuff for free. Peter uses the example of the LAMP stack as addressing new web sites and an area that commercial vendors overlooked. This is classic Innovator’s Dilemma. However, I would state this as there being a compelling differentiation other than just being open source. The 10 times factor of performance or new functionality allows the product to sell itself with the open source model being a swift closer. The community can be the source of the innovation that adds this wow factor.

I would add my own corollary to rule number one. Rather than just a large market, it needs to be a commodity market. With the commodity market you get the size need for critical mass and the market has been educated on the need for that product. This, by extension, means that not all markets are ripe for open source. Lall stated during the panel that not all markets need to be commodities since open source has been a major source of innovation. I agreed that some categories of open source were created by open source, but they are still commodities. An example is wikis, of which there are lots and it is now a commodity.

Looking at these rules, there are a number of industries that fall into these categories. Back in 2005, Peter was evaluating content management, wireless, system management, internet browsers, security, business intelligence, application infrastructure, middleware, databases, build and test environments, development tools. The only major category that was missing was games, which has 3 of the top 20 software companies. Most of these categories have had investment and new entrants funded by the major VCs, including Peter while at Benchmark. Perhaps you can consider other industries that are commoditized where you can tell one product from another except through very deep analysis.

Tim O'Reilly has said that when the price of a product like open source goes to zero, then the adjacent activities in the value chain gain value. This fits very neatly into Michael Porter's concept of value chains and competitive value. How you make money from open source can be divided into a few different models.Those models are dependent less on how you make money on the software and more on other activities that are adjacent to delivery and use of that software. The most common models are:

Support - This is the model that Alfresco uses. This about providing technical support, maintenance and bug fixes. In this model, the free version usually moves faster than an enterprise version where more time is taken to certify the product against stack components. Bug fixes to this enterprise version are given higher priority, but are eventually folded into the main code line.

Professional Services - This is providing professional services in using the software to create new solutions specifically for a customer. Custom engineering can also come under this category although the result can end up benefiting everyone as an enhancement to the product. JBoss and Interface 21 make some of their revenue from this model. At Alfresco, we give almost all the service revenue to our partners. Services is also one of the lowest margin businesses with the greatest risk in terms of building capacity.

Insurance - This is a warranty or indemnity on the product. The company supporting the open source product guarantees to support the customer for damages or claims that may arise from the use of the product. This is rarely provided on its own and is usually provided as a value-added service in conjunction with either support or services.

Enterprise Features - For those venturing into open source from a closed source background, this is the most comfortable model. By holding back certain features, particularly those that are related to scalability or system management, then users can try the software out, but if they are getting significant value from the software, then they will pay for this. We tried this model, but have decided that we could build a much larger community and hence more customers by providing the product 100% open source. Having enterprise features also encourages the community to replace your enterprise features, which can end up being counterproductive for everyone.

Hosting - Hosting is becoming a more popular way to consume open source software. The people who create the product can get value by providing the software as a hosted service.Embedding - Commercial vendors who can use open source software can often license the software to include it in an OEM relationship. This model is often accompanied by a dual license, a license that can be distributed as only open source or as an exception to those who pay for a commercial license. Once a commercial license is purchased, then the licensee is free to use the software however they feel appropriate. This is a model that was pioneered by JBoss, but originally developed by Ghostscript, an open source PostScript interpreter.

Each of these models has different implication in terms of how big the community it creates, the perception it gives to those trying the software and how much pressure there is on users to convert to a paid-for version of the software. Those who have given trust have often returned it with either contributing back to the project or paying for support when deploying the product into production. The exception to this are Google and Yahoo, who have created multi-billion dollar businesses using open source, but have given nowhere near as much back. This is one of the reasons that there is so much controversy over GPLv3, which attempts to set boundaries on fair use in a hosted environment.

The open source model is very powerful and rapidly growing. In our first full year of revenue, we have grown 50% faster than Documentum did in its first full year of revenue. You can use this model regardless of where you are located since it is inherently global. Despite slower uptake of open source in the UK, we have been able to distribute our software to countries where open source has greater acceptance and make a big impact in the US, the largest software market. It’s also a lot of fun, because people who are buying your product are doing it because they have already tried it and like it, rather than being convinced or coerced into using it.

There is still a lot experimentation in the above dimensions in the model, but I think we will be seeing a repeatable, cookie-cutter model. After all the fuss around GPLv3 dies down and after there is clear precedence on interpretation of LGPL, I think we will worry less about license and more about growing open source faster and seeing the disruption through.

2006.11.17

John Powell and I attended Accel’s CEO Day at the St. Francis Yacht Club in San Francisco Tuesday last week. This is an event put on by our investors, Accel Partners, and usually has a pretty impressive line up of speakers. This year the speakers included Expedia and IAC Chairman Barry Diller, IBM EVP of Innovation and Technology Nick D’Onofrio, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs, Lotus Founder and Mozilla Board Director Mitch Kapor, Cisco Chief Development Officer Charlie Giancarlo, and a crew of China experts including Vice Chair of China Netcom Ed Tian, IDG Chairman Patrick McGovern, IDGVC General Partners Quan Zhou and Young Guo.

Barry Diller is a fascinating man to watch who has such an enormous impact on conventional media having run Paramount, Fox Broadcasting, QVC and Expedia. In a fireside chat, Barry discussed the future of media as we are witnessing the breakdown of conventional media. With the barriers to distribution crumbling, the traditional media better wake up and he feels that one of the few that actually get it is Rupert Murdoch. He felt that Google has a great business model as essentially an advertising agency, but that YouTube as a phenomenon is temporary, but still a no brainer for Google to purchase. He felt that Yahoo has a very loyal base, but has been unable to monetize that loyalty. He spoke very passionately about the need for Net Neutrality, the ability to freely and equally access and publish on the internet despite what the telcos want, which he likened to the break up of the railroad monopolies in the 19th century.

Nick D’Onofrio discussed the notion of innovation at IBM, particularly after having survived the near death experience of collapsing IBM from 420,000 employees to 250,000, thus killing founder Thomas Watson’s legacy of lifetime employment. Having said that, Nick is a 40+ year veteran of IBM. He credits Lou Gerstner’s efforts to saving IBM and avoiding what seemed like the inevitable break-up of IBM. Nick was instrumental in IBM adopting Linux and allowing IBM to concentrate on what is core. It also help standardize infrastructure and allow the industry to move to the mix and match of Service Oriented Architecture, which he feels is now starting to pay off for IBM’s customer base. He commented on the lamentable state of patenting where frivolous patents are being issued and longed for the early days of IBM when they patented a mouse trap only when they could prove it actually caught mice. He feels that the only solution is to make the patent process transparent and declare the invention when the patent is filed. Nick is a big believer in open source and the standards process and has encouraged IBM to follow these wherever possible.

Charlie Giancarlo presented the future of Cisco that surprisingly had very little about routers. According to Charlie, Cisco will be making big investments in the devices and network appliances that deal with huge data transfer, particularly around video and video conferencing. They have a virtual meeting room, whose price is undisclosed, but which he said would only cost about $5k/month to operate. The experience is like actually being the room and can include multiple participants. Several Fortune 1000 companies have reacted very enthusiastically. In addition, Cisco will be working on home products that deal with video, music and other high data devices, where Cisco will provide transfer, search and aggregation products. When asked about Net Neutrality, Charlie said that Cisco has made its position clear - that investment in networking is capital intensive and that those who invest in this infrastructure must have the right to recoup their investment.

I didn’t get to see first hand the discussion on China, but John Powell did. The discussion centered on the idea that the Chinese government was very supportive of the entrepreneurial community. Instead of building a big bureaucracy for telco coverage in a new area of China, they would be willing to hand it over to an entrepreneur. The panellists discussed how they had access to the Chinese government with personal mobile numbers of officials to help speed access to decisions. The government is obviously very involved in the new start-ups, but in a very supportive way. John compared this to the discussion at the Accel event two years ago where the discussion was China is out for our jobs to now China is a big opportunity.

Mitch Kapor discussed open source and how communities are created through trust. He also said that most communities are composed of people who are disenfranchised in some way.

Paul Jacobs discussed the role that mobile will play with new media and Web 2.0. His sense was that video is a big opportunity for mobile which contradicted Barry Diller’s assessment that it will play no part at all. Paul felt that new mobile devices that are about to appear will have such high resolution and a relative field of vision that will provide a compelling viewing device. He also predicted that advertising opportunities on mobile are huge with end user buy in due to the contextual serving of the ads. Paul felt that Net Neutrality would not work at all in the mobile world. Scarcity of bandwidth meant that it could not be wasted and must be parcelled out.

I don’t remember who offered it up, but with 40 CEOs in the audience there were some interesting insights. Someone predicted that the next wave after all this internet, web 2.0, biotech, etc. would be robotics. The audience was surveyed as well about whether we are in a Web 2.0 bubble, bubblette or no bubble. The traditionally conservative audience of CEOs said we were in a bubblette, with long-time veteran Arthur Patterson of Accel saying we weren’t in a bubble at all. Fascinating day!

2006.10.31

I have been using Google ever since it became a public project at Stanford and the same is true of Yahoo. However, there are a few tools that I use for historical analysis and internet archeology.

Before Google, I used AltaVista a lot because it had the greatest coverage of the internet. AltaVista was a project at Digital, or DEC as it was known prior to merging with Compaq and then HP, as more or less a demonstration of the scalability of their equipment and covering all of the Internet. This means that they have a wealth of information back to 1994 or earlier.

Try using the date features in the Advanced Search and setting the date ranges to ranges such as Jan 1, 1995 to Dec 31, 1995. As an exercise, look for the following. When was the term "Enterprise Content Management" first used? When did it become popular and by whom? When was the the term "Customer Relationship Management" first used and by whom?

I also use Alexa and the Wayback Machine for historical views of web sites. Alexa made regular copies of the internet on a huge disk machine allowing you to see what a web site looked like on a particular day and also giving statistics on the usage of those pages. That view is now provided through the Wayback Machine. Alexa and Alexaholic are interesting tools as well, but do not go very far back.

Our plans for 1.4 which is our Business Process release with a preview this month

Web Content Management and plans for an entire ECM Suite

Our follow-on plans for 2.0 and beyond

The importance that performance and benchmarking play in our roadmap

We have been a bit slow on the podcasts lately. They have been very tedious to record and edit without proper equipment. So this time, we went out and bought proper equipment. This was a real lesson in the state of retailing in the UK.

If we were in Silicon Valley, we would have just gone down the road to Fry's and bought everything we needed. Unfortunately for us, Dixon's locked up the consumer electronic market during the Thatcher era and bought up all the competition on the High Street (the British equivalent of both Main Street and the local mall). During this time, there has been little choice and the people who work there don't seem to know anything about anything. Dixon's also owns PCWorld, which is a poor man's version of CompUSA. We tried both and ended up with rubbish equipment for recording podcasts.

Fortuantely, last Friday we were able to find some sound equipment at Maplins, that survived competitive pressure from Dixon's through a mail order business and now through the internet. They now have stores where we can browse around. It's not quite Fry's, but closer to what Radio Shack used to be. There they had analog and digital mixing boards for local DJs. I really liked the radio mixing board complete with Animal Noises and Applause buttons. In the end we settled for a simple digital mixer and now you get us in stereo!

We recorded this in one take and at 28 minutes, it is a bit longer than I wanted. That's my fault, but I hope you find it informative. By making it in one take (or a little minor editing) in the future and having equipment that doesn't require sound modification, we intend to do these at least once a week. Let m know what you think.